File:Rusty Nickel Brewing Company - fmr Keenholts Bros. Furniture - Buffalo, New York - 20211004.jpg

English: Rusty Nickel Brewing Company, 36 Broadway at Ellicott Street, Buffalo, New York, October 2021. A late-period but ultimately quite typical example of French Second Empire architecture adapted for use in a commercial building, 36 Broadway's most distinguishing feature is - as usual with the style - the tall, steeply pitched, slate-tiled mansard roof, pierced with a quartet of pedimented dormers on each side and undergirded consecutively by a prominent cornice and ornamental corbeling in the brickwork. The chamfered-corner elevation of the mansard, which also contains a dormer, was originally fashioned into an imposing corner tower with an ornamental cast-iron widow's walk at the top. The twin façades feature rows of windows with prominent cut-stone trim and topped variously with segmental arches (third floor) and flat lintels (second floor), while the storefront windows on the ground floor also retain a great deal of their original integrity, with stylized cast-iron pilasters interspersed between floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows. The building was completed in February 1880 and served initially as the factory and showroom of Keenholts Bros., a manufacturer of spring mattresses that had been founded three years earlier and had heretofore been housed in a now-demolished building across the street. The company had already earned renown for their Guarantee Patent Metallic mattress, but their move into this larger facility enabled them to expand their product line; two new folding models, the Keenholts Metallic Folding and Niagara Folding Spring mattresses, first went on sale that same year. Keenholts Bros. was eventually purchased by Henry Messersmith, moved in 1885 to a still larger location on Michigan Avenue, and expanded further; it was called Furniture Makers Sales Company and located on Main Street when it finally went out of business in 1922. As for 36 Broadway, in subsequent years the building served as home to a rapid turnover of commercial tenants of diverse descriptions, and had been subdivided into space for about a dozen office and retail tenants by 1930, when it served as the subject for Rainy Night, one of the most celebrated of the watercolor paintings of Charles Burchfield, a native of nearby Gardenville. Most recently, the address belonged to the Rusty Nickel Brewing Company, one of a growing number of locally-based craft breweries who used the ground-floor space as their tasting room and restaurant.